


take your silver spoon, dig your grave

by firstaudrina



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anonymous Sex, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Magic, Orgasm Denial, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 12:36:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16241747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: The irony of it all is that Venable was right. They did know each other. Gallant just didn’t know that they did.





	take your silver spoon, dig your grave

**Author's Note:**

> I placed all warnings in the end notes because they're spoilery, so please check those out if you want to know what you're getting yourself into. There are also some vague warnings in the tags.

The irony of it all is that Venable was right. They did know each other. Gallant just didn’t know that they did. 

It was a school night, but Michael had plans to take Miriam’s car and go into West Hollywood anyway; she didn’t care as long as there were no dirty socks on his floor or drips of black wax staining the altar. “Homework?” she called after him as the screen door slammed. Then she laughed. Michael laughed too.

He went out at night for practice. Getting people to do things for him was almost stupid easy, powers or no powers. One couldn’t underestimate the handy influence of being a blond-haired, blue-eyed white boy, the way it made people gravitate towards him, try to ingratiate themselves with him regardless of the holes in the knees of his jeans. He had one father to thank for that, and another to thank for the power sparking at his fingertips. Sometimes he wondered if people could sense that on him, the electric surge under his skin, or if it was really enough to be conventionally attractive in Los Angeles. Humans were shockingly base, and basic. It was almost depressing.

Michael was sitting at the bar negging a girl into buying him a drink he didn’t even want when he saw Gallant, drug-dazed and laughing as he spun around to a club remix of a Lana del Rey song. Michael stared, because for a second he thought — but no, this man was too frivolous, bubbling over like prosecco, not a single thought to be found in his pretty head. His hair was toxic blue like cotton candy, turned to cold fire whenever a whirling light swept over him. Gallant punched the air, crowing, “I love this song!”

“That’s really your name?” Michael asked later, once he’d dismissed the girl and lured Gallant over. Ignored the way the interest on his face made Michael’s flesh prickle and crawl. “Mr. Gallant?”

“Technically it’s my daddy’s name, but doesn’t it have a ring to it?” Gallant grinned, flashy, but when Michael didn’t react he scrambled. “My grandma’s Evie Gallant, you know, the movie star?” He held his hands up to his face, suddenly Marlene Dietrich, finding his angles in strobe. 

“No,” Michael said.

“Kids today,” Gallant sighed. His eyes had not left Michael, assessing and reassessing, trying to figure out what he was doing wrong and how to make it right. There was a vigilance there, but it was blunted by the extremity of his self-interest. He wasn’t eager to please because he feared punishment if he was wrong; in fact, the rope burns on his wrists indicated to Michael that he was likely very enthusiastic for punishment. He was eager to please because every glance and smile and touch from a potential partner got dropped into the deep well of his bottomless want. He needed to be liked so much he preened. He gathered up attention like a magpie and lined his nest with it, but he could never create a soft enough place to land. He could never fill it up.

It was rather nauseous-making. 

“So.” Gallant touched Michael’s knee, one finger sliding into the hole in his jeans, caught between denim and skin. “Wanna get to know me better?”

Michael laughed and said honestly, “No.”

He watched Gallant’s face fall, the exaggerated pout of his lower lip turning from coquettish to stung. “Well fuck you too.”

“Wouldn’t you like to?” Michael asked, leaning in close enough that hope flared in Gallant’s dark, dark eyes. But then Michael stood to leave. “You might be better off just fucking yourself.”

His abilities were not honed enough to know if Gallant would take that as a directive or not. Maybe he would find someone else to do the job. Either way, he would be thinking of Michael. Michael didn’t need magic to know that.

The next time Michael saw Gallant, he was looking for him. What he found was a man on his hands and knees, black jeans and briefs around his thighs, shirt pushed up over his pale back. Someone with big strong hands was gripping his hips and fucking him hard, Gallant’s eyes screwed shut and mouth open, panting. 

Michael did what anyone would do. He walked up and unzipped, pressed his cock against Gallant’s lips until he was greedily pulled in, came in his throat before Gallant even thought to open those dazed, dark eyes. “Oh,” Gallant said, laughing, goofily pleased. “Hello stranger.” 

When the other man was done with him, Gallant explained things to Michael about leather and submission and the blank ecstasy of it. Things Michael already knew, the way someone who had read too many books on the subject knew. Someone whose fingers hadn’t touched a buckle or whip. Yet.

“Of course, my goddamn grandma acts like I’m murdering kittens, but hello Evelyn, it’s 2015! She used to have one of those _50 Shades_ books on her nightstand, but I’m the pervert for actually knowing what I want and not being afraid of it? Please. Kink is so mainstream it’s barely obscene.” He sounded disappointed about this. 

“Grandmothers,” Michael said vaguely. “They can be so particular about pain.”

Gallant lit up now that he believed them to be on the same page. “Right? Oh, man, you totally get it.” 

“Mm,” Michael said.

Gallant became coy. “I didn’t expect to see you again. Definitely not like that.”

“I like to upend expectations.”

“Well if you’d like to _up_ end my —”

Michael did not linger for such pathetic double entendre.

They saw each other one more time after that. Michael had Gallant pressed face-first into the concrete wall of the back hallway in some trendy gay club, his navy vinyl pants digging into the soft flat of his stomach as Michael worked a hand under the waistband. His palm slid over Gallant’s ass. His fingers found what they were seeking and curled. Gallant whimpered and didn’t even try to move, like he was imagining himself bound. Michael could do that with his mind, weave wisps of energy into restraints that Gallant could never hope to break. But he liked it when people tied themselves up in psychological knots. 

“Do you want me to fuck you?” Michael asked. He was hard, there was no denying it. He leaned against Gallant so he could feel it. 

“Yes,” Gallant moaned. “Yes, _sir_.”

“I didn’t tell you to call me that,” Michael said. 

Again Gallant scrambled to readjust. “I meant yes, um, what should I —”

Michael pressed his fingers up into Gallant so hard it had to hurt. Gallant made a broken euphoric noise and forgot himself, one hand dropping to clutch Michael’s thigh. 

“Oh, _please_ ,” Gallant said.

Michael’s mouth ghosted over Gallant’s shoulder without actually making contact, then followed a tendon in his neck upwards. He tugged on Gallant’s little dangling cross earring with his teeth. “I want you to imagine a world where this is only you and I,” Michael said. “You are tied with your arms spread wide. It’s cold. Your skin ripples with goosebumps. You’re terrified. You’re aroused. You feel the phantom sensation of me inside you so viscerally that you would swear under torture it happened.” His hand moved faster, rough and careless. Gallant was pinned against the wall and trying to use it to get off, to no avail. “But even if you were the only man on earth, I wouldn’t fucking touch you.” 

He pulled away entirely, leaving Gallant confused and raw-nerved and hurt, turning to face Michael with so much blistering emotion on his open human face. His brows knit with embarrassment as his mouth twisted with anger and he was still hard, still throbbing for Michael.

Michael, who lifted a clean hand to trail three fingers over Gallant’s face — down the bridge of his pointed nose, over his irate eyes. 

“You have never seen me before,” Michael told him. Every feeling on Gallant’s face dimmed and blinked out of existence as his brain hastened to bend to Michael’s will. “But you will see me again.”

He left the club without looking back. In the morning, Miriam wanted to go grocery shopping. Michael sent five knives studding the body of a man who was rude to her. 

It was time for certain plans to be put into motion.

**Author's Note:**

> Some spoiler-ish warnings. I don't think this fic gets any darker than the show itself, but Michael is the Antichrist; he is not nice to Gallant. They have two sexual encounters. In the first one Gallant is looking for anonymous sex with strangers. In the second Michael denies Gallant an orgasm. Afterwards, Michael erases all of Gallant's memories of him so Gallant will not recognize him in the Outpost. I think that's everything, but if I left anything out feel free to let me know.


End file.
